the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords (wiki).

And that’s a case study for Master in Web Technology 2008 Edition, from Computer Science Departement of L’Aquila University. It’s a deal about links and keywords. Alfonso Pierantonio, full professor and founding father of MWT ‘08, organized and led a contest about SEO, giving some keywords (such as funzino apocrifo) and one target: lead the results list in three main search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Live Search), by typing this keywords.
The goal of this contest is to understand how a search engine works on results, finding a way to get our website at the top of the list. So many students partecipate the contest and Luciano, the winner, says “it was not so easy, one of most important aspects is to be linked by a more famous website, to increase the probability to lead the results list”.
Many different ways have been choosen by students: websites about funzino apocrifo, videos on Youtube that deal with this non-existing fish and much more.
A nice way to show some lack in the most famous search engines. According to Emilio Calvano, contest co-director, “Google has been hard to round on, while Live Search has been more friendly than we expected”.